Tomorrow’s agenda for BloggerCon calls for a discussion of blog and journalism. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading what other people had to say, synthesizing it in my own head and trying to figure out what it all meant. From there, I came to a couple of conclusions: Blogs are not journalism Journalism happens on blogs Blogs are the single biggest threat to the online publishing industry and the print publishing industry. Blogs are the single largest opportunity to the online publishing industry and could represent a big opportunity for the print industry. I know it sounds like 2 sets of contradictory statements but I’m really not hedging my bets here. What is happening is that blogs are representing such a radical shift in online publishing that what the response is from journalists and other content publishers will either increase or decrease the impact of the blogging phenomenon. What is happening is not so much a revolution as a continuing evolution of the trends started with the rise of the commercial Internet. Looking back, looking forward Let’s first take a step back in order to better understand the blogging phenomenon. They year is 1994. At that point, the…

There’s a lot of developments going on in the online space but most of them, while potentially changing the state of online business for years to come, have been flying under the radar for most people. It is interesting to see that what some of us are witnessing is really the beginning of a silent revolution, currently underway but far from the glare of most journalists and of the general population. An example of this is the weblog. While the more web-savvy participants amongst us are very familiar with the concept, there seems to be a lack of understanding of what blogs are about. Most dismiss them as diaries (which some blogs, like those hosted by LiveJournal, truly are) but fail to realize that there is a lot more going on in the space. I recently had a chance to discuss emerging trends in technology with a number of Internet executives for large companies and was very surprised to see how quickly the weblog phenomenon is being dismissed. What I suspect is that this is largely the result of the complexity of weblogland, an area that is hard to really classify neatly in a few buzzwords. A world where Glenn…